The present invention relates to a camera control system which allows a plurality of persons to remote-control at least one camera.
In recent years, the assignee of the present applicant has been making extensive studies and developments of a so-called camera control system as a tool for detecting the states at a plurality of remote places.
In this system, cameras, the pan angle, tilt angle, and zooming of which can be remote-controlled, audio input devices for inputting audio data, and image communication terminal devices (servers) for transmitting/receiving image data input by the cameras and audio data input by the audio input devices via a network are set at a plurality of places.
A client""s terminal device converts image signals transmitted from the image communication terminal devices at a plurality of places to display images on a monitor, and converts audio signals to output sound to a loudspeaker, thus recognizing the states of the camera locations.
In the above-mentioned camera control system, as the number of cameras to be controlled becomes larger, the user need to recognize the camera locations more easily. For this purpose, a system that superimpose-displays icons representing the cameras on a map screen as indices indicating the positions and directions of the individual cameras has been proposed by the assignee of the present applicant.
In such camera control system, every user who uses the system can freely remote-control cameras connected via the network.
However, with this system, persons within the image pickup range of the remote-controlled cameras are always monitored, and they strongly feel uncomfortable. If the users on the client side can freely remote-control the cameras or audio input devices, the states of the regions, which should be hidden from those users, are detected unwantedly, resulting in poor security. Hence, the system must be built in consideration of such situation.
To solve the above-mentioned problem, the assignee of the present applicant has proposed a control system in which the image pickup inhibited ranges of the respective cameras are set on the map screen to remote control the cameras, thus physically and substantially inhibiting image pickup within those image pickup inhibited ranges.
However, in the conventional camera control system, audio information within the image pickup inhibited ranges may be input unwantedly.
Also, even when the control operations such as panning, tilting, and zooming of the camera are executed, audio information cannot be obtained in correspondence with such control operations of the camera.
It is an object of the present invention to inhibit an audio input within an image pickup inhibited region. It is another object of the present invention to provide a real audio output corresponding to an image output.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a camera server which manages clients in units of a plurality of groups, and allows clients belonging to these groups to control cameras within the limitation ranges of the corresponding groups.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a camera client which is connected to the camera server and allows the user of that client to recognize the restraint contents.
Other features and advantages of the present invention will be apparent from the following description taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, in which like reference characters designate the same or similar parts throughout the figures thereof.